You can see sharks in our local aquariums — Zebra sharks, Bull sharks, Scalloped hammerheads, Sand tiger sharks, and much more. But have you ever noticed that you’ve never seen one with the world’s largest predatory fish — the Great white?
Aquariums such as Marineland, SeaWorld, Steinhart Aquarium and Monterey Bay Aquarium (MBA), have, attempted to house Great Whites, but to no avail. The longest lasting only 6 months, as achieved by Monterey Bay Aquarium in 2004.
The first step to maintaining a Great White is that you need a big tank. In this case, MBA designed an 1 million gallon egg-shaped tank about 11 metres deep.
The second step is to target a certain age group of sharks. Adult sharks tend to be almost 5 metres long, so MBA acquired a shark less than a year old, with a drastically shorter length of approximately 1.2 metres.
The third step is to keep the Great white captive in an ocean pen. This is so that they can monitor the shark before transporting it to an aquarium.
The fourth step is to design a custom built transport tank with life support. This includes video cameras, lighting and filtration systems that will monitor and adjust accordingly to the shark’s condition over the span of 9 to 11 hours. The necessity of the tank lies in the fact that Great Whites, unlike most fish, can’t execute buccal pumping, a type of breathing where most species can open and close their mouths in order to pump water through. Instead, Great Whites have to continuously swim through the water with their mouths wide open — which is exactly why they become weaker as soon as they are captured in a net.
However, the Great White in MBA was released after 6 and a half months, after it feasted on 2 other sharks.
A reason why Great Whites don’t last long is that they constantly bump into the sides of the tank, causing them to fail and weaken.
Another reason is that more pelagic sharks such as the Great white, Hammerhead or blue sharks like to roam around the vast ocean. This can be seen from a tagged Great white, where it swam long distances without hindrances, changing directions only as it pleased.
As described by Jon Heoch, Director of husbandry operations at MBA, “It’s a very very very resource intensive program and we felt like we had accomplished our goal of introducing the general public to a live white shark.”
Bibliography
Vox. (2016). Why no aquarium has a great white shark [YouTube Video]. In YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMbHLF_zwjs
Allen, F. (2022, July 14). Jaw-dropping moment world’s toughest great white shark Brutus goes in for the kill in incredible u… The Sun; The Sun. https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/19201137/worlds-toughest-great-white-shark-brutus-video/
